By Noah Rothman
Thursday, April
15, 2021
“Racial
discrimination against minorities is a chronic sickness in American society.”
“…the challenges facing the United States
in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four
years, such as Black Lives Matter.”
“[S]lavery is the original sin of America.
It’s weaved white supremacy and black inferiority into our founding documents
and principles.”
What distinguishes these relatively
similar remarks about America’s flawed past and imperfect present? The first
two were delivered by Communist
Chinese officials in an effort to embarrass the
United States on the world stage. The third is an
indictment of the United States by the United States itself.
That particular remark comes from the head
of the American mission to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield,
in a March speech
before the UN General Assembly. She recently reiterated the themes of that speech in an address to the
non-profit group founded by Rev. Al Sharpton, the National Action Network. “Of
course, when we raise issues of equity and justice at the global scale, we have
to approach them with humility,” Thomas-Greenfield
conceded. “We have to acknowledge that we are an
imperfect Union and have been since the beginning.”
Thomas-Greenfield is presently focused on
getting the U.S. back into the United Nations Human Rights Council, an
organization from which the U.S. withdrew in 2018—and for good
reason.
The UNHRC is an organization plagued by
corruption. It elevates miscreants like China,
Algeria, Congo, Cuba, Pakistan, Venezuela, Russia, and Qatar to membership. It
maintains a permanent agenda item—Item Seven—dedicated to the criticism of Israel. It elects people like Richard
Falk, a 9/11
conspiracy theorist and obsequious
apologist for the terror group Hamas, to
oversee the situation in the Palestinian territories. It selects individuals
like Jean Ziegler, a co-founder and recipient of the preposterous “Gaddafi International
Prize for Human Rights,” to defend Venezuela’s murderous Maduro regime as a
victim of America’s “economic war.” And so on.
And, of course, the UNHRC appears to share
Amb. Thomas-Greenfield’s assessment of America’s terribly unimpressive record
when it comes to the promotion of racial comity and minority rights.
In 2020, the Council adopted a resolution
unanimously and by voice vote authorizing “a report on systemic racism,
violations of international human rights law against Africans and people of
African descent by law enforcement agencies,” in the U.S. The death of George
Floyd proved an occasion for Russia’s envoy to denounce the “calamitous state
of human rights” in the U.S., and it allowed China’s representative the chance to
denounce America’s “chronic and deep-rooted
racial discrimination.” Sound familiar?
When riots and violence followed the
anti-police violence demonstrations that year, UN Special Rapporteur on the
promotion and protection of human rights condemned the U.S. response.
“International human-rights law protects the right to freedom of expression,
association, and peaceful assembly,” said Rapporteur Fionnuala Ní Aoláin. “It is regrettable that the United States has chosen to respond to
the protests in a manner that undermines these fundamental rights.”
Advocates in favor of the Biden
administration’s efforts to make anti-racism “the business of the whole of
government,” including the conduct of foreign affairs, insist this is
clear-eyed honesty that advances U.S. interests. As Joe Biden
himself said, “we’ll be a much more credible partner
because of these efforts to shore up our own foundations.” But lending credence
to the worst calumnies against the United States has already frustrated the new
UN ambassador’s goals.
Amb. Thomas-Greenfield cannot help but
qualify any condemnation of a foreign state’s human-rights record with a
perfunctory nod to the legacy of racism in the U.S., diluting the effect of her
efforts to shine the spotlight on the world’s most abused and repressed
peoples. For example, in March, Thomas-Greenfield accused Beijing of grotesque
abuses against minority groups such as the Uighurs, to which China replied with
its own condemnation. “If the U.S. truly cared about human rights,” China’s
representative said, “they should address the deep-seated problems of racial
discrimination, social injustice, and police brutality, on their own soil.”
And how did the ambassador respond to this
charge? By legitimizing it and reinforcing it by relating her own experience
confronting racism when she worked as a teenage babysitter. “We have flaws.
Deep, serious flaws,” Thomas-Greenfield admitted. “But we talk about them. We work to address them. And we press on, in
hopes that we can leave the country better than we found it.” Consider the
subject changed.
Proponents of making anti-racism into a
theory of international relations have succumbed to the most blinding
solipsism. The tortured effort to equate racial tensions, lingering personal bigotries,
and even the illegal (and
prosecutable) mishandling of minorities by police
with, for example, the resettlement of an entire ethnic minority into reeducation and labor camps requires you to sacrifice even the most elementary powers of
discernment. It isn’t enlightened—just the opposite. It is bafflingly stubborn
and deliberately dense. Worst of all, it is a belief system that leads its
advocates to all but defend the actions of genocidal states.
After all, who are we to
judge?
If our objective is the advancement and
preservation of human rights abroad, this sort of behavior only makes that goal
harder to achieve. The alternative to this conduct isn’t denying the fact that
racism exists in ours and every other society on earth. It is having the capacity
for circumspection—just enough to recognize that episodes of overzealous
policing are not the same thing as ethnic cleansing, forced labor, and
genocide.
The world’s rogue states have long sought
to blur the clear and discrete lines between their systemic abuses and
America’s imperfections. For some reason, the Biden administration seems to
want to give that sort of craven propagandizing a boost.
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